Review: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Directed by Frank Oz, 1986.
A musical horror comedy that surfaced as a necessary answer to the 1980s sci-fi boom in the United States, Little Shop of Horrors underperformed at the Box Office but has since become a cult classic on video and DVD. The movie is set in the 1960s and makes fun of its contemporary culture as we so proudly do now with the culture of the 80s and 90s. What makes this movie so fun to watch is that it’s – as simple as possible – just extremely ridiculous, but in a good way! Muppet-man Frank Oz based the movie on Howard Ashman’s theatre musical Little Shop of Horrors, which was in turn based on the 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors – yes, that’s right, it still had uncool ‘the’ attached to it, something producers seem to think is Box Office-poison in the early 21st century.
Either way, this movie was made as a parody of the sci-fi craziness which spawned the now still-not-grown-up Star Wars-fans. It would take more than a decade for the genre to recover – which happened mostly thanks to Hollywood’s SFX departments – but Little Shop of Horrors excels in something almost every movie in these Dark Years lacked: fun!
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